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Or consider it another way: We hold the universe, with its
content entire, to be as all would be if the design of the maker
had so willed it, elaborating it with purpose and prevision by
reasonings amounting to a Providence. All is always so and all is
always so reproduced: therefore the reason-principles of things
must lie always within the producing powers in a still more
perfect form; these beings of the divine realm must therefore be
previous to Providence and to preference; all that exists in the
order of being must lie for ever There in their Intellectual
mode. If this regime is to be called Providence it must be in the
sense that before our universe there exists, not expressed in the
outer, the Intellectual-Principle of all the All, its source and
archetype.
Now if there is thus an Intellectual-Principle before all things,
their founding principle, this cannot be a thing lying subject to
chance- multiple, no doubt, but a concordance, ordered so to
speak into oneness. Such a multiple- the co-ordination of all
particulars and consisting of all the Reason-Principles of the
universe gathered into the closest union- this cannot be a thing
of chance, a thing "happening so to be." It must be of a very
different nature, of the very contrary nature, separated from the
other by all the difference between reason and reasonless chance.
And if the Source is precedent even to this, it must be
continuous with this reasoned secondary so that the two be
correspondent; the secondary must participate in the prior, be an
expression of its will, be a power of it: that higher therefore
[as above the ordering of reason] is without part or interval
[implied by reasoned arrangement], is a one- all
Reason-Principle, one number, a One greater than its product,
more powerful, having no higher or better. Thus the Supreme can
derive neither its being nor the quality of its being. God
Himself, therefore, is what He is, self-related, self-tending;
otherwise He becomes outward-tending, other-seeking- who cannot
but be wholly self-poised.
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